Posts Tagged ‘Taglit’

Taglit-Birthright will, for the first time, allow participants to freely visit more parts of the historical heartland of the Jewish People, according to a report in Makor Rishon.

Taglit-Birthright takes Jewish youths to Israel for free, so they can connect to their historical roots, see what Israel is today, and meet other Jews, and hopefully marry Jewish.

Until now, Taglit-Birthright has not allowed visits to many areas in Judea and Samaria as part of their program, purportedly to avoid the (internal) political conflicts that those trips might raise, and in part because of the exorbitant cost of the armored buses they feel they need.

But during the past month, Taglit-Birthright has begun allowing groups to visit Gush Etzion, south of Jerusalem, without requiring special permissions in advance.

Among those places that can now be visited are Kfar Etion, the ancient aqueduct to Jerusalem underneath Efrat (Emet HaBiyar), and Machon Tzomet.

We can only hope that at some point Taglit-Birthright will also include trips to Hebron, and the Tomb of the Patriarchs.

The Taglit-Birthright Israel program has expanded eligibility for its free 10-day trips to Israel for Jewish young adults ages 18-26 to include teenagers who went on an educational trip to Israel during high school

Birthright’s eligibility guidelines previously stated, “If you have been to Israel before but only with your family or on other personal business, you are still eligible. However, if you have been to Israel as part of a touring group, educational program, study program or an organized extended residential program since you were 12 years old, you are not eligible.”

“I think everybody thought about [the change in the eligibility guidelines] for many years, and everybody wanted to have it,” Noa Bauer, Birthright’s vice president of international marketing, told JNS.org.

“It was a matter of funding, and I think today you see more anti-Israel things on campus, and we realized over the years that people that have been to Israel again have more confidence for talking about Israel, and geopolitics, and anything pertaining to Israel after visiting with Birthright Israel. I think we’re one of the best platforms to do that for college students.”

In the 13-plus years since philanthropists Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt joined forces with the Israeli government, the Jewish Agency for Israel, global Jewish communities, and other philanthropists to fund Birthright, the program has taken about 350,000 young Jews to Israel.

A series of studies by Brandeis University’s Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies have shown that former Birthright participants are 42 percent more likely to feel “very much” connected to Israel compared to people who didn’t go on the trip. Program participants are also more likely to belong to a religious congregation than those who did not attend Birthright, and participants are also slightly more likely than non-participants to make charitable contributions to Jewish or Israeli causes, according to the Cohen Center research.

Eduardo Elsztain, Argentina’s richest man and a follower of Lubavitch-Chabad, along with Israeli entrepreneur Motti Ben-Moshe, is set to take control of 75 percent of Israel’s giant and debt-ridden IDB Holding conglomerate that has its fingers in supermarkets, paper, mobile phone, insurance and cement companies.

Credit holders have overwhelming voted for Elsztain and Ben Moshe to enter and take control from Nochi Dankner, who says he will put up a fight against the buy-out.

Israel’s Big Business elite, approximately seven companies that control more than half of the manufacturing in the country, is dominated by Israel’s richest families, almost all of them left-leaning and secular, a term that does not necessarily mean anti-religious and often includes men like Dankner who observe traditions and are respectful of Judaism.

The entry of a Haredi could be a sign of something spiritual happening, or it could not.

The facts are that Elztain’s representative in Israel has been Shlomo Lapidus, a Haredi businessman and also from one of the wealthiest families in Buenos Aires. A textile company founded by his father is translated into English as “With G-d’s Help.”

Elsztain is president of Chabad, has served as treasurer of the World Jewish Congress, founded Hillel in Argentina and is a big investor in the Taglit-Birthright program.

Big Bucks execs like to jet around the world and visit expensive hotels, but Elsztain does not let that keep him from visiting the graves of righteous Jews when he visits Israel.

This may not be a new trend, but it bears watching.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to see a chain of markets in Israel welcoming buyers with an image of the Rebbe?